How to prevent drunkenness and alcoholism

According to a recent study, kids from intact families (raised by married biological mother and father) who learn to drink at home have the lowest rates of alcohol-related problems versus those who are not allowed to drink at home at all, and versus those who are allowed to drink at home, but are not from intact families (single parents or parent married to stepparent). 

It is as if parents don't have any wish to see their kids passed out on the couch (or vice versa), and as if kids won't be so enamored of Falstaff and Boone's Farm after they've had something drinkable. I know that Bugweiser had no appeal for me when I returned from Germany, for obvious reasons.

Maybe instead of fighting to keep the drinking age at 21, end the drinking age altogether and stop government policies that effectively promote single parenting and divorce.  Might do us some good.

Book review: the Medici Effect

I had the opportunity through work to read a business book, I think, called The Medici Effect by a gentleman named Frans Johansson.  Being something of a history buff, I thought it would have been interesting to read a book applying the lessons learned by the Tuscan "Royal Family" of bankers and assassins to business.

The verdict?  One star, and I'm being generous.  The ideas there are nothing new--restrain the accountants to actually allow your "artists" to shine and the like--and the author makes no attempt to actually connect the Medicis to the business cases he discusses.  In other words, the entire book is a gigantic, trite, bait and switch, and the Harvard Business Press let him get away with it.  The fact that this book got published is not exactly an endorsement of an Ivy League education, to put it mildly.

The only really good things I can say about this book are that it only took a couple hours to read, that he at least doesn't recommend hiring assassins to improve one's business, and that at least he didn't (as did another business book I picked up recently) get an endorsement from Ken Lay of Enron.  I won't be reading--or reviewing--that one. 

A dearth of resources, or of character?

SayAnythingBlog linked to USDA figures regarding food stamp usage and benefits; evidently the average recipient gets $133.79 per month, which is disturbingly close to my family's weekly grocery budget.  If one adds in free school breakfast and lunches (worth about $20/week per child where I live) and WIC (about $20/week per eligible child), I find that government food assistance significantly exceeds my family's weekly food budget--by about 20-30%, really.

Beyond the obvious wisecrack "well, I guess that's why Dinesh D'Souza came here to see fat poor people," it also should remind us that the poor in the United States do not, by and large, have a crisis born of a lack of resources.  Quite frankly, my family could cut our food costs quite a bit by eating more beans instead of meats, switching from butter to margarine, from olive oil to canola, and so on.  It would not surprise me if we could get well below $200/week and still eat quite well.

Or, in other terms, about $120/week less than what our government decides is appropriate for those who are "poor".  So my question is simple; do our poor have a crisis of resources, or do they have a crisis of character, creativity, and such? 

Personally, I'm thinking that teaching poor people how to cook might do far more for them than WIC, SNAP, and all those programs combined!